Make a Table

Organizing your thinking is something mathematicians are really good at. Students, often, are not. So we offer the question of, "what needs to be organized?" and then encourage students to try different ways to organize the quantities and relationships in a problem. Finally, a gallery of all the tables generated by the class presents even more ways to organize data to best see patterns.

One way to make making tables powerful and painless is to use spreadsheet software. Things like drawing straight lines, adding or rearranging rows and columns, and repeating calculations become easier, so students can focus on the math and problem solving.